That is easy enough. Just do a link: query on any one of the sites in my sigline. I am sure you will come up with enough examples of backlinks coming from a page that is less than a PR4.

My remarks were about individual page PR though. Do not misunderstand what I was trying to convey.

That's what I meant too.

The site's PR is irrelevant. It's the page that counts. I'll check your sigs...

I stand corrected.

Sorry for argueing.



<edit>

Why is it then, that when I do a "http://www.a-site-i-run.co.uk"

LOADS of pages show up, most with a PR2+.

However when I do link:http://www.a-site-i-run.co.uk that only a few show.

There is more to this than meets the eye methinks...

I know that Google has started to devalue some pages that are called links or other-sites or resources, perhaps if that is the case, it also removes those pages from the link: search...

Any clues ronnie?

</edit>

One is a text search, the other is link: search.

Doing a the query "www.mysite.com" with quotes does not return backlinks at all. It returns all instances (up to 1,000) of that text appearing on the page.

Look closer at those pages and you will see that the text is plain site somewhere on the page. It may or may not be in the href= attribute of the anchor tag at all. Sometimes the actual href= attribute of the anchor will be a dynamic reference (javascript, cgi-click link, etc.).

I understand that...

the href= is there.

It's not a redirect link, or javascript.
I take special care with backlinks. I won't exchange links with someone if I know it is a redirect or a javascript, because all i am doing is adding content to their site.

"www.mysite.com" shows the pages with the links, it shows the links (Some of the pages it shows don't include links obviously).

link:www.mysite.com doesn't show those pages. It's as though the links aren't there, but i know that they are.

This is why I was arguing the PR4+ thing.
There has to be some reason why the link:www.mysite.com isn't showing all of the links...

*confused*

SEbasic.

All I can say is what everyone else says. Google is only showing a representative sampling of the backlinks it has in it's index, and not the entire lot of them. I would not worry too much over the why of it.

Heck last December right after the Florida Update ... the backlinks appeared to be randomly shown and totally different counts. When you hit refresh, the total count would change as well as the list of sites with the backlinks. There was no rhyme or reason to it. That really set the chatter going on all the forums. Nobody really knew what it was all about I think....probably just tweaking of the algo.

Sometimes I really wish I could get my head around this...

Think of it this way:

Q: Who searches for backlinks to a website?
A: Webmasters and SEO guys.

Q: Who does Google consider to be its target audience?
A: Not webmasters or SEO guys.

I really don't know whether the links:www.domain.com syntax shows only PR4 backlinks or only PR3 backlinks or what the story really is and I'm not sure anyone else really knows that except the Google guys - what I do know is

1. using that syntax will NEVER show you all the backlinks to a page
2. PageRank (PR) is based on links from pages (including directory listings and links in forums like this one) pointing to your page and the PR of those links - if you think you've found a page with a high PR and no backlinks, you're mistaken - you may not be seeing those backlinks but they are there somewhere
3. just because Google is stingy about reporting your backlinks doesn't mean they don't know about them - they do - it's how PR is calculated

To get a better (but still incomplete) idea of how many backlinks you have, try one of the alternate syntax forms - see Google Advanced Search Operators. But bear in mind that Google likes to hang on to some of its secrets - that's how they stay ahead of unscrupulous SEO guys and webmasters trying to gain unfair advantage in the search results.

Cheers minstrel...

maybe I should get My avatar up too...